Fooling the Filipino people via propaganda!
A few days ago, the Social Weather Station and Pulse Asia came up with a report that said that the public satisfaction of Pres. Benigno Aquino III bounced back in the 3rd quarter of 2014 after falling to a record low last June. That SWS survey was done from September 26 to 29, which showed 59 percent, satisfied with Aquino’s performance and 25 percent dissatisfied for a “good” net rating of +34. SWS said, “This net satisfaction was a nine-point improvement from the “moderate” +25 in June where 55 percent were satisfied and 30 percent dissatisfied with Aquino’s performance.”
These were two articles that came out a few days ago that caught my attention that reminded me of Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, “You can fool some of the people most of the time and most of the people some of the time, but you can never fool all the people all of the time.” Gads! When will they stop? We have always known that SWS and Pulse Asia are owned by cousins of PNoy and as such, we strongly believe that they are part and parcel of Pres. Aquino’s Yellow Propaganda machinery, where they manipulate those surveys and have the mainstream newspapers and TV networks report them as if PNoy is still popular despite the huge negatives plaguing his regime.
We’ve written many times in this corner asking SWS and Pulse Asia how they conduct those surveys and how those questions were asked. They merely reply to you saying that their surveys were done with 1,200 adults nationwide and had sampling error margins of ±3% for national and ±6% for area percentages. But how do we know that their surveyors were doing this nationwide? They won’t tell you… as it is a secret. If they told you how they did it… you’d end up asking more questions as to why those questions were asked in this or that manner.
Mind you, the Aquino propaganda machinery mimics that of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, whose canine loyalty to Der Fuhrer was without question. In fact when Hitler committed suicide, Goebbels also poisoned his wife Magda and his three daughters and Alsatian dog then killed himself. Actually Goebbels learned his art of propaganda from Mr. Edward Bernays who is considered “The Father of Public Relations.”
Edward Bernays was the nephew of the famous Sigmund Freud. He strongly believed that manipulation of the press was necessary in society; the term “Banana Republic” was coined by him during his stint to overthrow the corrupt government of Guatemala. He believed that manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society. This is why he uses propaganda to define his public relations. Obviously someone learned from him and it was Jose Goebbels, who used his tactics to fool the people of Germany.
A few years ago, CNN featured an aging man who turned out to be one of the radio broadcasters under Jose Goebbels. He was on the air spewing out the greatness of the Third Reich and that Der Fuhrer Adolf Hitler was winning the war… while Allied bombs were falling in Berlin. Yes in the end, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime fooled the German people for nearly a decade through propaganda…spewing only lies and falsehood as the people had no way of checking whether those facts and figures they aired over the radio were true or not. Germany later found the bitter truth when they lost World War II.
Today, the way people running Malacañang’s communications department are doing are no different from what Jose Goebbels did for Germany during World War II in his propaganda ministry. They use SWS and Pulse Asia’s highly questionable surveys and have them published in our national dailies where radio commentators and columnists write their opinions based on those surveys. But they could never fool me. Of course we know who the Yellow journalists and radio commentators are squawking hosannas’ to the greatness of Pres. Aquino. They just don’t know that they have lost their credibility.
Finally, the SWS surveys say that Aquino’s latest net satisfaction rating stemmed from improvements in Metro Manila, Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. If you ask the people in Mindanao… they are disgruntled with Pres. PNoy Aquino because of the incessant brownouts happening there. Not to mention that the NPA’s are running wild attacking the police and military outposts. You want to talk about the MNLF and MILF insurgency?
Here in the Visayas…notably Cebu, PNoy gave nothing in the last 4 years of his reign. Sure he finally had the Bus Rapid Transit and the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority leased out and approved. But these are projects done from the time of then Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Hence as far as we are concerned PNoy’s popularity has gone very much down, propaganda has to be employed to prop him up!
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